Guest Column: Down The Memory Lane..

Volume 4 Issue 11 Nov 2014

LOST AND FOUND!!

“What is your name?” I enquired. “Sharukh Khan”, he promptly replied with a smile on his face. “No, tell me your real name?” I asked him again to this young adolescent who was brought to our hospital by a police officer who found him wandering on the road as he failed to provide any information about his whereabouts. On further evaluation it became apparent that he had a low intellectual capacity and as a result he was unable to provide much detail about himself and his family.

At the request of the officer he was admitted in the hospital without having any clue about how we will be able to help him. Interestingly he was not worried at all about him being lost. Every day the resident doctors will try to talk to him in order to get some information about his parents, residence, school but this Sharukh Khan would only naively smile.

Once, while strolling in the corridor he entered the kitchen of the hospital and picked up some wheat flour in his hand and muttered “Baba Girni” (Father, Flourmill); he was promptly reprimanded by the kitchen staff and sent back to the ward where he was admitted. For next few days he kept of saying “Baba, Girni”. Once a staff took him to a small temple under the Banyan tree situated in the hospital campus, where he saw an idol of lord Ganesh and identified it as a
‘Chintamani’ (one of the names of lord Ganesh).

A brilliant resident from Yavatmal district put these two facts together and deduced that he must be from a place near Yavatmal where there is a famous chintamani temple and his father must be either having a flourmill or he must be working in a flourmill. Without any delay, he called up his relative who happened to stay near chintamani temple and told them about this boy who called himself Sharukh Khan and asked them to visit all the flourmills near chintamani temple. To our utter disbelief and delight, the very next day Sharukh Khan’s father landed in the hospital and identified him as his son. Obviously our Sharukh Khan (whose real name was Sameer) was also pleased to see his father and greeted him with a hug and a big smile.